And how is it that we hear, each of us,
             in our own native language?
                                      —Acts 2.8

I crave chocolate, but that doesn’t matter.
Years ago my wife craved carrots.
She ate so many her skin turned orange.
We found out it was because her body
really craved beta carotene
because she had cancer. (She lived.)

Sometimes we hear what we want to hear,
and un-hear or mis-hear the rest.
But maybe on Pentecost they heard
because it was something they knew they needed,
something their soul, not just their ego, craved.
Not just a treat, but life.

Sometimes we crave chocolate from God,
hoping to hear what we want.
But deeper, trickier, more silent,
sometimes even more foreign sounding,
is the real Word that we crave.
Your deepest craving is probably true.

Imagine that we are given
not just what people think they want,
but what their souls most deeply crave,
and we are give the power to share it,
so they hear, in their own language,
the grace of God.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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We were sitting around talking
about how he loved us,
when it flared up in us—not a memory,
but inward fire, the love itself,
like a mother’s love that drives her
into a burning house to save her children—
his love, this unbidden passion
for the world, flamed up in us
and drove us into the streets
to seek the stranger, to embrace
the foreigner, and to speak—
how to convey it?—this love
for all who’d been told
they were outsiders,
in languages not our own:
locked doors opened,
fruit placed in their mouths,
hands laid on their shoulders,
belonging nested in the crib
of their hearts. Homecoming.
That day there were no strangers.
We were all kin, all learning
how to listen together for the first time
to this mystery rising up to greet us
in each other, all of us losing
our tongues for the language of God.
Then we knew that fire Jesus had
had not been put out:
it was in us, now, spreading, yes, actually,
like wildfire.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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         “The glory that you have given me
         I have given them.”
                           —John 17.22

God has given you the same glory God gives Christ.
You are not created in error or failure, but in glory.
God’s glory shines in you. God is not served
when you dismiss God’s work, or dishonor the light.

Beneath the grime of our judgments, the slop
and crud of our feelings, invisible even
to the person themselves, is a great magnificence,
humble, often lonely, yearning to be seen.

God’s glory shines in everyone, in every child,
in the demented curmudgeon, the strung-out addict,
the convict and the executioner, and most of all
in the person you meet next. Do you see it?

Like an antique dealer looking past the dust,
a mother loving her child beneath the stains,
learn to see as God, with eyes for glory.
Seeing so will make your own eyes brighter.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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Yes, child, I hear you.
I know your suffering.
I know because I am in you, suffering.
And no, it is not fair.
But then, nothing is fair.
I did not create “fair.”
I did not create “deserving.”
You all did.
I created only being—
and, because it is mine, it is being Beloved.
You wonder if I’m here,
listening, responding.
Remember when you fell,
and your mommy held you?
Remember her love,
and how it comforted you
and made it better?
I don’t manage the world.
I don’t push things around,
not bullets or germs or people.
But I love you.
I won’t save you from life’s hurts,
even the awful ones.
But I am here, holding you.
With all my heart I want your wholeness,
and even now in ways you can’t see
healing is happening in your body and soul,
and in the world.
That is me. That is my love.
My dear one, I hear you.
I pray to you, to trust me.
I am holding you.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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Abandon your thoughts of thoughts or feelings,
the moods that come and go.

Hope is a practice, an act you can do
even as you mourn, or regret, or dread.

Hope is an act of trust, regardless
of what the future may hold,

trust in the gravity of grace,
the life that sings in all things:

the arctic tern facing an ocean
who lifts her wings, and goes,

the stream that unfurls through the woods,
the roots that reach and curl around stones,

the earth that circles around the sun
one more time, and one more again.

The child who turns to her mother.
The hand of the Healer on every torn thing.

Hope is not wishing but acting.
Birthing. Planting. Getting up.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             He was lifted up,
             and a cloud took him out of their sight.
                                      —Acts 1.9

Heaven is not up, but in.
It’s the heart of things.
That’s where God is.

Jesus was pure love,
the love of God made flesh.
He was resurrected
not as an individual,
but as a community.
We’re his risen body.

The angels at his tomb said “He is not here.”
He is not in any “here;”
he is in us, each of us,
and all of us together.
When Jesus was raised
and came to the disciples
it was not to prove a point,
but to give them his spirit,
so we could be the living body
of the risen Christ.

When he “ascended”
it doesn’t mean he literally
floated up into the sky.
It means he dissolved into us,
like salt dissolving into the soup.
Christ, the love of God made flesh,
is now in us.
We are witnesses—we are the evidence—
of resurrection.
Go.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             They asked him, “Boss, is this the time
             when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”
             He replied, “It is not for you to know…
             But you will receive power
             when the Holy Spirit has come upon you,
             and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem,
             in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
                         —Acts 1.6-8

God, will you please restore democracy now?
Just grab the remote and select the scene
and start at the happy ending, OK?

Nope. No skipping ahead,
no distraction gazing at a future that isn’t here.
Stop wishing.

And stop thinking politics will save you.
God will not jump in, align with any party,
occupy any office. God is love, not a fixer.

God pours power into us, the fire of love.
We are witnesses to that love. There is no plan,
no platform, just this passion for the world.

Even when times are dire (yes, the temple
will soon fall) our only power is love.
But it wakens crowds, turns ships.

Out we go, outward and ever outward,
aflame with tender mercy, beyond all boundaries
till they are no more, and there is only love.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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God, I was trying to write you a prayer
but the ink leaked onto my fingers,
the words all over my hands,
and I tried to wipe them off
but I got the words all over me
and then whole sentences got smudged
onto everything around me,
onto the world and wouldn’t you know it,
there’s no more ink left in my pen,
and I think I’ve lost the prayer entirely,
except I keep seeing it
on every tree and wall and person and headline,
and even the streets are smeared with it,
and even the clouds at times seem
prayerfully inky, and at night—
well, all I see is the ink of my prayers.
But my thoughts
have no more words
so




Amen.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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In beginnings,
in most awful blank,
God speaks noise into harmony,

light where there was none,
Creation out of the mess,
life out of the grave.

Still, always, everything,
even suffering, even death,
is subject to Creation.

Evil decomposes, breaks down
into fear and sorrow and want.
Becomes compost.

Failure is soil for grace.
Weakness offers room for strong roots.
The seed that has died bears fruit.

Love is eternal. It doesn’t die.
It evaporates.
You can’t see where it goes.

Resurrection is not what happens later,
but the revealing of the uncontainable grace
in what is.

Bearers of goodness and mercy,
even in failure and defeat,
you shine in the darkness.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             “Those who love me will keep my word,
             and my Father will love them,
             and we will come to them
             and make our home with them.”
                         —John 14.23

There’s no throne room, but a kitchen,
a table we sit around that we all have scrubbed.
We share meals, and stories, and chores,
the small closeness of a family warmly knit.
The conversation over the bread and wine
is intimate, honest, easy. There are in-jokes,
plans and memories, things we noticed,
dreams, what we’ve gone through together,
thoughts about events of the day. And those looks
across the table, lovers’ gazes, or how parents
watch children they cherish, the wordless nearness
of siblings who love each other. Sometimes
it gets late and we don’t bother to turn on the lights,
we just keep talking in the dark, or sit, silent.
There are mistakes, of course, and arguments,
but always forgiveness. When we go to our rooms,
or out the next day into the world,
it seems we never really leave each other.
The home is inside us.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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